Turning Mexico to light beer

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s Corona Light is the most popular imported light beer in the United States, but you can’t get it south of the border, where beer drinkers order their brews in pairs yet rarely reach for a low-calorie alternative.

In a Mexico City cantina, real estate broker Omar Vazquez was drinking Coronas — regular ones.

“I’ve had thousands of beers, but light beer, I’ve tried it maybe three or four times,” said Vazquez, who at 73 said he had been a beer drinker for nearly six decades. “It’s something you drink if you there are no other options. The beer of last resort.”

Mauricio Brocado, a Mexico City analyst who tracks Mexican brewers for brokerage firm Deutsche-Ixe, said light beer accounts for less than 2 percent of the country’s $3 billion domestic beer market. At the same time, Corona Light had $47 million in sales in the United States in the first half of this year, up 9 percent from a year earlier, said Bump Williams, of Information Resources Inc., an international marketing research organization.

Mexico’s biggest brewers — Corona’s manufacturer, Grupo Modelo, and the brewing unit of bottler Fomento Economico Mexicano, or FEMSA — are trying to convert more Mexicans into light beer drinkers, with ad campaigns that give the brew a sharper, edgier image and that convey the idea that less really is more.

It’s quite a challenge. Demand for light beer is so minuscule that Corona Light — the 14th best-selling beer in the United States and among America’s fastest-growing imported brews, according to Williams — is produced for export only. Mexico’s best-selling light beers are Modelo Light and FEMSA’s Tecate Light.

“We look at light with a certain amount of distrust,” Brocado said. “Those who drink beer, drink beer — not something seen as less than a normal beer.”

Brewers are dealing with the same marketing issues that American beer makers had decades ago, when they were struggling to get consumers to try it. Light beer was seen by many as a watered-down alternative until the early 1980s, when Miller Lite used sports stars to create the very popular “Taste’s Great!”/”Less Filling!” ads.

“That convinced guys it was OK to drink light,” said Julie Bradford, editor of the Durham, N.C.-based All About Beer Magazine.

American trends usually catch on in Mexico, albeit sometimes years or decades later. “We are expecting to see light beer sales increase because of the popularity in the U.S., (but) only a little bit at a time,” Brocado said.

Near the U.S. border, light beer does enjoys stronger sales, with up to 15 percent of the brew market in some cities. But being so close to America is definitely a factor.

“The category of beer is highly associated with a more American style of life,” FEMSA said in a statement it prepared for this story.

Both Grupo Modelo and FEMSA say an evolving Mexican market, including a growing health and fitness trend, also made it impossible to ignore light beers.

“The consumer is demanding a low-calorie beer, and we are responding,” said Jose Pares, a spokesman for Grupo Modelo.